When viewing broadcast television programs, for example upon a digital television set, a viewer often desires information about forthcoming programs in order to plan future viewing. Such program information may be supplied to the digital television in an electronic form known as an Electronic Program Guide (EPG). An EPG includes program information contained in a file or data stream with a known format, which can be parsed and presented to the viewer as a visual display. The viewer may then navigate the visual display using a remote control device to find or identify program information and issue commands to the television.
The EPG can, in principle, contain information about an unlimited number of channels and programs for broadcast by each channel. Presenting all the available program data to the viewer on a single display screen is impractical, as the information may need to be rendered in a size too small to be readily understood. Further, the simplicity of the typical remote control interface limits the ability of the viewer to interact with the display, which can make the task of navigation tedious and unpleasant.
Current EPG displays present a subset of the information to the viewer in a linear arrangement that may be scrolled by the viewer using simple “Up” and “Down” controls to uncover or reveal the content of the EPG not presently displayed (so-called “off-screen content”). Such linear scrolling is visually monotonous and can quickly exhaust the viewer's patience. Moreover, the viewing display of a digital television can vary widely in size and aspect ratio, and the typical linear display is unable to adapt to these different conditions. A need therefore exists for a visually interesting yet readily comprehensible manner of presenting the program information obtained from an EPG that is adaptable to different classes of consumer digital television displays. Such a presentation is desirable to be easily navigable by the simple controls of the typical remote control.